Under the Purple Umbrella is here
The first novel is live. A love story set in the Veneto, built from longing, rain, and the things people leave unsaid.
After two books of nonfiction, I am stepping into fiction with Under the Purple Umbrella, and I am equal parts terrified and grateful. It is a novel set in northern Italy, in the towns and train stations and rain-slick streets of the Veneto. It is about two people who find each other by accident and then have to decide whether that accident was a mistake.
Why a novel, and why now
Nonfiction lets you argue. Fiction lets you feel. I wanted to write something that did not need a case or a proof, something that could simply sit with a reader in a quiet room and do its work without footnotes. Under the Purple Umbrella is that book. It is the story I have carried the longest, and the one I was most afraid to tell.
The purple umbrella itself is real. I was sitting outside a cafe in Atlanta one afternoon when the rain had just subsided, the streets still glistening, the air carrying that particular freshness that comes only after a storm. Down the avenue came a beautiful woman holding a purple umbrella, and the sight of it stopped me mid-sip. She was not the first. Years earlier, another woman had carried an identical umbrella through a similar rain, and that earlier image had stayed with me the way certain moments do, the ones that feel less like memories and more like premonitions. Seeing it again, held by someone new in a city that held both stories, the past and the present folded together in a single instant. I went home that evening and put pen to paper. The novel began there, in that overlap, in the space between what had happened and what I could not stop imagining.
What the book is
It is a love story, but not a tidy one. It is about the seasons a person carries with them after a place is gone. It is about the words people leave out because they think silence is safer. It is about cobblestones, balconies, espresso at the wrong hour, and the courage it takes to admit you do not want to leave.
I wrote it slowly, in the mornings, in Atlanta, Georgia, with 90s slow jams playing low in the background. I wanted the sentences to feel like travel even though I was writing them an ocean away from where they take place: not every detail planned, but every detail earned. If you have ever stood in a foreign city and felt more yourself than you do at home, this book is for you.
Where to find it
Hardcover, paperback, and Kindle are all available on Amazon now. If you read it and something lingers, a short review is the best gift you can give an independent author. Reviews are how books like this find the readers who need them.
Under the Purple Umbrella is eerily similar to events that unfolded in a life lived in Italy. Whether that life was mine is a question I will let the reader answer. Some stories are too true to be called fiction, and too personal to be called anything else.